The Pirate Bay is hijacking your browser to mine cryptocurrency

I’m not one to pass judgement on anyone who illegally downloads movies, TV shows, or music, but if you’re visiting a site in order to find media to steal, you probably shouldn’t be surprised that the site you’re using is stealing something from you, too. That seems to be the case with The Pirate Bay, which has reportedly added coin miner software to its website which hijacks some of your device’s CPU muscle.

Just hours after the site added the coin miner, negative posts began popping up on Reddit complaining about Pirate Bay webpages suddenly causing a huge spike in CPU usage. The site’s operators posted an explanation shortly after, formally announcing that they are testing a coin mining plugin as a potential stand-in for traditional advertising. They also noted that the software wasn’t meant to completely take over visitors’ CPUs, but use somewhere between 20% and 30% of it.

The Pirate Bay’s official statement reads as follows:

As you may have noticed we are testing a Monero javascript miner.

This is only a test. We really want to get rid of all the ads. But we also need enough money to keep the site running.

Let us know what you think in the comments. Do you want ads or do you want to give away a few of your CPU cycles every time you visit the site?

Of course the mining can be blocked by a normal ad-blocker.

Note :
Initially there was a small typo so all CPU for a client was used. This should be corrected now so only 20-30% should be used.
Also it is restricted to run in one tab only so even if you have 10 tabs oven it will only be running in 1.

It’s definitely an interesting strategy, and with the kind of traffic The Pirate Bay typically sees — it’s consistently a top 100 site worldwide on Amazon’s Alexa tracking — using the CPUs of its users to process cryptocurrency could very well generate sizable income. Unfortunately, the site really put itself in a tough spot by not announcing the “test” ahead of time, and that little typo that resulted in 100% CPU hijacking won’t generate much good will either.